Who doesn’t love an old chair? I’ve got one in my yard, so do a small handful of my neighbors.

As a symbol, there’s certainly a sense of pride in having one. As a actual piece of furniture, there’s something both nostalgic (remembering seasons past) and optimistic (getting excited about seasons yet to come) about placing your rear end in one during the offseason.

This is especially true when the chair was one of your favorites during it’s years on the cable. Something that, safe to say, is likely more common for passholders than others.

Which is exactly why I love this promotion from Alyeska.

Chair + Passholders
When an old chair is retired, any number of things can happen. But if the lift isn’t moving to a new home, the most common is selling off the chairs for a price that seems to be climbing faster as faster.

I bought a single chair in 2002 for a couple hundred bucks. Today, a triple or double can run $1,000 which makes it harder and harder for a humble passholder to buy a slice of memories and easier for a well-to-do out-of-towner to swoop in and add to his/her collection.

But take a look at this promotion:

We've started to pull the chairs off of Chair 1… Anyone who has purchased a 2017/18 season pass or buys a pass by Sunday, June 4 will be entered to win a Chair 1 chair! Visit the tram ticket office or AlyeskaResort.com to buy your pass now!

A post shared by Alyeska Resort (@resortalyeska) on Jun 1, 2017 at 6:18pm PDT

Is that not brilliant?

It creates a massive incentive to renew or buy a season pass and does so with the people that are most likely to have fond memories and the closest relationship to that lift in the first place.

And all in a way that gives the people who care the most – passholders – the greatest chance of getting their hands on one whether they have the extra funds or not.

So Simple, So Clever
Big shout out to Benjamin Bartz for finding this one for me. It really is one of the simplest, cleverest promotions I’ve seen in the last couple years.

Great work by the crew at Alyeska for seeing an new (marketing) way to use old chairs.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.